Last year our apartment association took an initiative to plant saplings on the road outside our apartment premises. The objective was that the children will plant these saplings and take responsibility until they grow into strong trees.
For the next few weeks every child that was engaged in this initiative took extra care of the saplings and with the help of adults they even secured some with boundaries. And about 3 months later the caretakers started deteriorating. As I would walk by that road with my pets every day , I noticed these saplings grow consistently from sapling to the size of medium size bush to a lovely tender tree, almost like a toddler growing into teenager.
While all were growing well, there was one particular young tree that I would watch almost every day growing into nothing but ending up with broken branches as she was spreading out wide open. I personally started catering to her by tying the branches or giving her support with the adjacent wall. At one point of time I was worried whether she will survive or not. Another couple of months passed by and yet it remained the most shortest amongst the rest of her friends.
I have been on travel mode since January this year with infrequent visit to her status quo and what took me by surprise when I went to check on last week was that this tender tree had not just only grown thicker but taller as well with branches spread out more than the other trees in the row. I felt “WOW she made it”!. I then wondered at my own limitations, I could not see that she was growing everyday in her roots stronger and stable . My eyes and thoughts had barriers of their own which did not allow me to look ahead beyond either and all I did was compare her with others peripherally while I was nurturing her. Little did I realize that she took the same time as others however the rate of growth varied in comparison with others.
Now I pondered, what if this tree were to be a human child, by now how much humiliation, criticism, comparisons, and negativity she would have assimilated in its system. All she was doing was spreading out to explore, but her branches were cut as they were inconvenient to some set of beings. Don’t we do this with our children or even for that matter with ourselves? Limit our potential just because it does not fit into the norms of a defined perspective. A perspective that is defined by an individual based on his/her personal experiences and imposed as a general norm. But in reality, everyone experiences the same situation in different ways for a simple reason that every one is unique and thats why feels and responds differently. It is said that human behavior derives from three key sources : Desire, Emotion and Knowledge and this is bound to vary with every individual. In such case standardization of success is not even the way to measure anyone’s achievement in life and infact success is not always what you
Most often what I observed is that our individual self-worth is so low that we start associating our worth with everything that fits into the bracket of others point of view. For example, I met a young girl who was all worried about her being over weight and how her family & friends were worried (which in reality translated as loads of criticism ) about her and had ongoing feedback on how she can lose weight or how she can look better. All this concern did no good to her rather made things worse as it lead to thoughts of “ Iam no good, i cant wear dresses i like, everyone always makes comments on what i wear or how i should behave, no one likes me, I hate myself, I was so good before, “ . And my fundamental question to her was how does gaining weight change any part of you ? You are still the same just with few kilos extra? You associate yourself with your weight or peoples opinion or with who you are? It’s a matter of lifestyle change that will help you put things in order for your self, provided you accept the current reality and you are willing to make a change. All it takes is to accept the truth no matter how hard it comes on us and then realizing what are your true feelings behind each of these and make a plan to over come one by one.
Similarly, we all get impacted in other areas of our life such as career, finances overall health, family, friends and all that one desires to be. But the fact is that you always have a choice to change your life tremendously by knowing that you are not in competition with others but only and only yourself! You are unique and so are your strengths and weakness! You take responsibility of your life and stand tall just the way the “Tree” did! There is never an end to success, it’s a journey and whether you believe it or not, accept it or not, in the end “Growth is an eventuality for every living being”.
As Confucius said “It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop”, so take charge of your life and appreciate the uniqueness you and everyone carries within them and take out time to nurture not just the self but others as well. For it is in Giving that we Receive!!!
Great inspiration!!